Inside Joke
by the laws of transitivity
Summary: Pyro comes to the Brotherhood island and Toad is assigned to train him. You can only assume they'll get along great! Sure... Rated for language and stubborn terrorists.


Inside Joke 

They always laugh about it, Mystique and Sabertooth do, when they're out doing recruiting. They know that it was probably cruel to joke about this sort of thing, but what else could they do?

While checking out a potential recruit, one would smirk and mention something along the lines of, "I don't know. She doesn't really seem like Mort's type," or, "You really think he'll go for Toad?" or, "That one's really gonna hit it off with ol' frog legs." The other would laugh because, oh, it was so true.

Mortimer Toynbee- Toad- had a real problem. Perhaps it was from a lack of affection as a child or the fact that he'd essentially holed himself up in a cave for his entire adult life (when he wasn't on jobs, that was) or maybe it was just general psychosis, but he habitually fell for whatever recruits they brought home. They could bring home a boy five years younger than him or a woman twice his age and he would simply _pine_ after them.

Sometimes he would come across someone naïve enough or crazy enough to reciprocate his oddly immediate attachments, but more often than not, they would keep their distance and he would make himself miserable over it.

There had been the former prostitute, Tabby, who had been into the freaky and all for messing around a little. When he tried to push the emotional side of a relationship, though, she freaked out a little. Eventually, he convinced her to have a serious relationship, but within a month, she was sleeping around on him and ended up giving him the clap.

After her came a thirty-five year old man with a fish-type mutation who had to leave the Brotherhood rather quickly because there was no government established on the island that had blazed the trail of restraining orders. Mort sulked for two weeks.

Next, a seventeen-year-old hydrokinetic named Sean captured his heart. The two of them fucked like rabbits for a good three weeks, then when Sean finally saw Mort killing people on a job, he decided that villainy was not for him. The last Raven heard, he was distilling drinking water in third world countries.

After that came Lance, Wanda (who turned out to be Magneto's daughter and was therefore off-limits), Marta, Nicolas, Pietro (who also turned out to be Magneto's kid), and the latest catastrophe was a forty-year-old woman with selective telekinesis. Magneto was particularly pissed when she left because of Mort.

You'd think that after all of this, he would start to recognize a pattern, especially when Raven and Vic teased him for it relentlessly, but no. In his mind, apparently, it seemed completely normal for him to have this sort of unluckiness in love. For some reason, he didn't see a need for a change in his patterns. The people he fell for were flawed, he was flawed, but his methods were fine.

They'd started taking bets around the island as soon as they heard that Mystique and Magneto were bringing someone home with them. Some said that it would be a week before Mort decided that he was in love with the new pyrokinetic. Others speculated a day, maybe two.

-----

St. John Allerdyce arrived in late January. The amphibious mutant was making repairs on his helicopter on the day that the boy arrived, so he didn't get a chance to see him until the next day. In the mean time, everyone else at the island took advantage of the delay and talked to John, trying to get a better guess at how it would go with him and Mort. Money was no object at the Brotherhood, but they were betting serious chore hours.

When they talked to him, though, they were absolutely shocked. Pyro was rude, uncensored, blatantly bisexual, snide, sarcastic, mistrustful, and held a certain air of masked insecurity and stewing bitterness about him. If someone got at him with a green magic marker, he would _be_ Toad. Everyone insisted that it would take at most three days before they got together. Maybe this one would actually last? The thought baffled.

Better yet, early the next day, Magneto decided that Toad was to be Pyro's superior, the one that trained him.

-----

"You're Toad?" It was more of a statement of a comment than a question.

They were in the training room, John standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed over his chest, flipping that Zippo steadily. Mort was doing chin-ups with his back to the boy, acknowledging his presence no more than a simple agreement of, "Yep."

The younger mutant paused for a moment, waiting for his superior to add anything to that statement. When he realized that he wasn't going to say anything else, he informed Mort in a rather defiant tone, "I'm Pyro."

There was another pause before the older let out a small grunt of effort and snickered. "Yeh? You come up with tha' creative little nick-name y'self, kiddo?"

Scowling fiercely, he spat, "Yeah, 'cause 'The Toad' is such a leap of the imagination. You come up with that all on your own?"

His superior dropped down from the chin-up bar, cracked his neck slowly, then turned around to face John with an unimpressed smirk. "Nope. People been callin' me tha' since before I knew how t'say it," he told him simply.

A finger trailing from beneath his eye down his cheek, John mocked a tear of sympathy with a blank expression. "So sad. Did you get the memo? You're supposed to train me, not use me as a therapist."

"My apologies, Princess," he sneered.

They stood there glaring at each other for a minute, arms crossed over their chests, jaws clenched, feet set apart. Their eyes narrowed at the same time, fists clenched a little harder.

Finally, the silence was broken: "You don' stop flippin' on tha' fucking lighter an' it's gonna end up some place you really don' want it."

John held up the lighter, fingers extended away from it in surrender. "Apologies, Princess," he echoed.

They stared each other down for a moment longer, the thoughts in both of their heads very much the same: _What an obnoxious little fuckhead! Can you say issues? Jesus, I can't believe I'm stuck with him!_

Finally, Mort turned away, walking over toward the supplies closet. John stayed where he was, unsure of whether or not to follow. His superior glanced over his shoulder at the boy. "What're you doin'?" he snapped, "Get your ass over here. Y'not gonna get anywhere in th'Brotherhood just standin' around waitin' f'puberty to hit."

Shooting him a sarcastic ha-ha-very-funny expression, the boy stalked toward the closet while the other mutant picked out decent training clothes that would fit him.

"D'you need braces or anythin' like that?" Toad asked disinterestedly.

"Do I look like a fucking cripple?" he deadpanned.

Mort's teeth ground together imperceptibly. He wore braces- his leg muscles had superhuman strength, but the bones couldn't hold up to the impact most times. God, he wanted to strangle that brat. He shoved a set of training clothes at John roughly and told him to put them on.

Glancing at the clothes before giving his teammate a long up-and-down glance-over, John asked, voice dripping with condescension, "What, you just gonna stand there and watch me, _Toad_?" He sounded cocky about it, seductive yet cruel.

"Kid, I wouldn' fuck you if my only other option was the Blob," Mort informed him with the same venom-dripping edge of dislike, "an' I was expecting you'd use one of th'changing booths- unless you were plannin' a little striptease for me."

The boy looked behind him at the stalls he had not noticed previously and fought off all signs of embarrassment. Instead of surrendering this verbal game of chicken to Toad, he smirked and set the clothes down beside him and slowly started peeling off his t-shirt, eyes locked on the other mutant's.

Mort kept his eyes fixed on John's, refusing to show any sign of interest or discomfort as his trainee wriggled out of his jeans- commando underneath, waited a second, then started pulling the training clothes on.

After he was fully dressed, the younger picked up his Zippo and gave it one good click.

"You're fucked up, you know tha', _Pyro_?"

"Preaching to the choir, nutcase."

"Get in th'fucking testing room, Princess," Mort snapped, thrusting a finger at a metal door next to the supply closet, "I gotta see how long it takes f'you to fall on your ass in a real fight."

Nearly swaggering with cockiness, expression confident, John walked into the testing room, determined to win this one on skill alone.


End file.
